An Undead Tale of the Teenage Years

‘Let the Right One In,’ a Stage Version of a Vampire Novel

Let the Right One In , starring Rebecca Benson and Martin Quinn, is playing at the Apollo Theater in London.Credit
Manuel Harlan

LONDON — And just when you thought you’d had your fill of young vampires in love, along comes a ravishing little romance of the undead that’s guaranteed to warm — and break — your heart, even as it chills your blood. “Let the Right One In,” which is bringing limelight to endless night at the Apollo Theater here, turns your emotions inside out in a way you probably haven’t experienced since you were a teenager.

Such an inversion is fitting, since this latest exercise in exquisite agony from John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett (“Black Watch,” “The Glass Menagerie”) is all about the confusion, cruelty and moral anarchy of that purgatory we call adolescence. A production of the National Theater of Scotland, “Right One” offers the most gut-twisting presentation of the middle teens as a supernatural horror story since Brian De Palma’s movie cameras invaded the girls’ locker room in “Carrie.”

Wait a minute. I can think of one more recent variation on the same theme that ranks with this impeccably realized play, and that would be the 2010 Swedish film of the same title. That “Right One” was written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted it from his own novel. It was such a tightly controlled, expressly cinematic study in terror that bringing it to the stage sounded like one of those lost-in-translation misfires for which theater people are famous these days.

Anyway, the same material had already been turned into a well-received English-language film called “Let Me In.” Granted, Mr. Tiffany and Mr. Hoggett had delivered a Tony Award-winning hit with “Once,” another stage show based on a movie. But weren’t they pressing their luck, especially given the weary preponderance of vampires in contemporary pop culture?

Yet, while Jack Thorne’s careful, skillful script follows the plot of its source point by point, this “Right One” feels as fresh as newly spilled blood. (Well, I couldn’t say paint, could I?) The production is suffused with the ineffable, lyrical empathy for souls in limbo that Mr. Tiffany and Mr. Hoggett brought to Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” on Broadway last year. These guys are fast becoming the theater’s poets laureate of human loneliness.

You probably already know from fiction (Anne Rice’s novels), films (“Twilight”) and television (“True Blood”) that being a vampire can be a lonely business. But at least in those versions, being undead usually provides the compensations of also being seriously cool and drop-dead gorgeous.

The young lovers at the center of “Right One” possess no such advantages. Oskar (a pitch-perfect Martin Quinn) is the sort of doughy, graceless boy who might as well have “bully target” stenciled on his forehead. He lives in a Swedish apartment complex with his tediously egocentric mother (Susan Vidler), who doesn’t do much to raise his self-esteem, and at school, he is routinely tortured by a couple of strapping louts (Graeme Dalling and Cristian Ortega).

Photo

Rebecca Benson and Martin Quinn play neighbors drawn to each other at an apartment complex in “Let the Right One In.”Credit
Manuel Harlan

It is some consolation when the new girl next door, named Eli, turns out to understand his agony, since she’s even more of a pariah than he is. Given abjectly feral life by the uncanny Rebecca Benson, she’s a slumped, wheyfaced thing with zero social skills. She also, as Oskar charmingly tells her, smells like a wet dog, or perhaps clotted pus beneath a bandage.

And what’s with that hulking, glowering father of hers (Clive Mendus), who does not approve of her playing with Oskar? Does the arrival in town of Eli and her dad (except he’s not, really) have anything to do with the sudden spate of murders in the woods near the apartment building?

Of course it does. “Right One” is no whodunit, or even a why-dunit. Those answers are evident from the get-go. Instead, the production devotes itself to conjuring the geography of the hopeless, horizonless wasteland in which young people often find themselves when their hormones fully kick in.

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Christine Jones’s set is a snowscape of leafless trees, which, as lighted by Chahine Yavroyan, manages to be stark and shadowy at the same time. It brings to mind both the Brothers Grimm and the “selva oscura,” or dark forest, of life that begins Dante’s “Inferno,” and it’s a place where people are always lost, whether they know it or not.

Working with an ensemble of only nine, Mr. Tiffany, the overall director, and Mr. Hoggett, who specializes in expressive and subtle choreography, populate this forest with what feels like a full town. As they go through their ritualized, internalized gestures — including a bizarre, sad and lovely series of pas de deux with those barren trees — its inhabitants always seem to be searching for something.

That could be love, companionship, maybe only themselves, but you know they’re not going to find it. This is the world on which Oskar casts his uncertain but unforgiving gaze. Adolescence may be hell, but is adulthood any better? Mr. Tiffany has astutely said that he sees “Right One,” with its centerpiece of a girl who will never grow up, as a kind of Peter Pan story.

Nobody flies in “Right One,” since its tragedy is that everyone, even Eli, is anchored to this earth. But its world pulses with otherworldly undercurrents, beautifully sustained by Gareth Fry’s sound design, that match the tension of Oskar’s (and our) ambivalence about Eli.

Duty compels me to note that blood flows freely in “Right One,” and not always in predictable ways. (Jeremy Chernick is in charge of some truly special special effects.) The production also contains the single most terrifying coup de théâtre I’ve witnessed since “Shining City,” Conor McPherson’s everyday ghost story, came to Broadway eight years ago.

But it’s not that moment, jolting though it is, that keeps haunting you after “Right One” ends. It’s being made to feel how the shadow of old mortality inevitably creeps over and darkens love. That is true, it seems, even when one of the lovers happens to be immortal.

“Let the Right One In” continues through Aug. 30 at the Apollo Theater in London; apollotheatrelondon.co.uk.

A version of this review appears in print on July 8, 2014, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Undead Tale of the Teenage Years. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe